Pedestrian is a leading arts organisation specialising in music and arts education based in the heart of Leicester’s bustling city centre. Since 1998, they have built a strong track record of delivering high quality creative activity.

They provide education, training and outreach projects for young people at risk, vulnerable adults and communities in Leicester, Leicestershire and across the Midlands. Their participants are often socially excluded, not in education, employment or training (NEET) or experiencing disadvantage.

They believe that with the right levels of support and timely intervention everyone can achieve their goals – they call this ‘Pioneering Potential’.

Creativity is a key part of their lives. At Pedestrian they offer the chance for everyone to explore this through music, dance, photography, street art and many other art-forms regardless of who they are and where they come from.

Pedestrian worked with us on our third cookbook, Secret Dishes From Around the World 3. They commissioned the fantastic artist Andrew Petrouis to create a digital artwork for the project.

Leicester South Foodbank is an organisation seeded by the Trussell Trust that provides invaluable services to the local community. They help individuals and families in crisis, through the provision of emergency food supplies. 

We worked with Leicester South during our 2021 Reverse Advent Calendar Campaign.  The project encouraged people to donate a specific item to their local food bank  every day leading up to Christmas. We created a resource hub on our website with information about food banks across the country and promoted our free donation tracker to help people support their local food bank.

Perfectly Edible UK is a community project based in Leicester providing hot food to those affected by food poverty in the city. The project functions through a network of food redistribution, rescuing high-quality food from local supermarkets and food retailers that would otherwise be discarded as surplus to requirement. Perfectly Edible runs a weekly market where those in need can collect food supplies free of charge, and maintains a frozen department known as ‘The Chilled Cow’ where customers can collect frozen and refrigerated items. As a small-scale community project, Perfectly Edible regularly organises lunch clubs, community meals and social activities to bring people together and prevent loneliness, particularly in the aftermath of the pandemic. Even during the pandemic, Perfectly Edible continued to collect surplus food from all across Leicester and deliver it in parcels to those in need.

Leicester is also home to Soft Touch – an arts organisation specialising in art and music outreach across the city. As a charitable enterprise, Soft Touch Arts generally works with socially excluded and disadvantaged people, seeking to bring them closer to their communities and to help them achieve their personal goals. Soft Touch’s ‘UpStart’ project gives young people the opportunity to develop their self-confidence and self-communication skills through regular creative sessions in art and music held at schools, youth clubs and other community venues. Meanwhile, Soft Touch’s ‘Youth Music’ project offers music sessions specifically for young female musicians on Monday evenings, and runs music classes on Tuesday evenings for young people with higher support needs or learning disabilities.

Our Community Cookery School team visited Leicester as part of the Secret Dishes From Around the World book tour in 2021. Whislt we were there, we spoke to Selena Blakeley from Pedestrian, who worked with us to commission the artwork for the German section of the cookbook. We then spoke to artist Andrew Petrouis, who created the resulting piece, ‘The Lady of Leicester’. You can listen to both interviews on our Share Your Secrets podcast, which is available for free via Spotify, Google and Apple!